Play Dirty (2025)

½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Tony Shaloub
written by Charles Mondry & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw It took me 72 hours to finish Shane Black’s Play Dirty, his long-gestating take on Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under his nom de plume, Richard Stark), which adapts no particular one of the 28 published but rather attempts to transplant the general vibe of the series into a complex, violent heist concept set in the current day. I can maybe get behind the idea of it. Especially since it began life as (or at least shares a title with) the legendary–and legendarily discarded–script for Lethal Weapon 2. You know, the one that Black, after getting paid a then-record six figures to write it, was asked to make less sadistic. A skosh lighter on the misanthropy, perhaps; a soupçon more likely to support a burgeoning franchise by, oh, not killing off the star, let’s say. I like Shane Black, for all his lapses in judgment and vile bedfellows. I think he has a way with hard-R action, and I’m a fan of his patter, his dense verbal humour, whose frat-boy sensibility I could rationalize until now. I’m starting to think it’s a reflection of someone not entirely capable of growing up. In other words, Black is feeling like an indictment of me, this child of the Blockbuster, holding on too long to my affection for one of my obnoxious uncles.

This Parker, as played by vacuous wet wool sweater Mark Wahlberg, is a dead-eyed, humourless simpleton constantly wondering in the wordless, pleading way a goat asks for a field of milkweed. If the cadence of normal speech is iambic pentameter, make his an iambic dumb-asseter, all of short phrases ending in a mildly questioning tone, whether or not a question is being asked. The kind of cadence that develops when one becomes used to always needing to ask questions, and equally as used to not understanding the answers. You keep asking out of habit. You can tell by the blankness of his expression that he’s not expecting an answer he will understand. It’s like explaining physics to your dog. As Play Dirty opens, Parker, a master thief (snicker) and head (snicker) of a band of career criminals, is betrayed by vicious assassin Zen (Rosa Salazar), who murders everyone and makes off with a few hundred grand. Well, not everyone everyone–and soon Parker pairs up with his favourite recurring character Grofield (Lakeith Stanfield) to seek vengeance on Zen, though not before helping Zen knock off members of The Outfit, Parker’s former employers. The Outfit happens to be in the process of stealing treasure from a Latin American country, by the way, and also I’m lost. I do know a shipwreck is involved, which I choose to think of as some of that Shane Black meta humour about the prospects for this film the moment Robert Downey Jr. decided he was too busy trying to resurrect the MCU and Marky Mark Hammer-timed into the frame. A shipwreck about a shipwreck. You still got it, Old Man.

Having a witless oaf play one of the most brilliant antiheroes in the pulp pantheon is one of those mistakes you can’t really come back from. Imagine Wahlberg as Indiana Jones. Imagine him as Martin Riggs. Looking good in tighty-whities isn’t a personality. It’s not charisma. Play Dirty is a non-starter. With a different lead, the jokes suddenly land, the timing suddenly works, and all the supporting characters who seem unmoored are immediately witty and dangerous. When Zen throws a few jabs at Parker, it’s like someone swatting a fly with a Buick. Consider a scene where the two confront a gay nightclub owner whose boyfriend has just been killed. Zen asks Parker to allow her to ease into the conversation, but Parker butts in immediately, leading the club owner to start screeching his horror and grief (immediately undoing whatever goodwill Black accrued with his Gay Perry character from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). “You weren’t getting anywhere,” says Parker in his happy-go-fucky dimwitted way–his version of interpreting a line reading, i.e., asking Text-to-Speech to read the script for him enough times for him to parrot the right noises in the proper sequence. With this guy to play off, even Stanfield looks lost at sea, his desperate riffing to CPR some life into this thing the sort of night-at-the-local-improv-show shenanigans the kids would rightly label “cringe.” I’m sorry, doctor, this patient is not only dead, he’s just twelve cabbages in a trenchcoat.

As for the plot? It’s three or four action sequences with violent shootouts and dozens of collateral corpses, plus a runaway train, some car chases, a handful of point-blank executions, and a Maltese Falcon ending that would’ve played better with anyone but Mark Wahlberg in the lead. Have I said that already? In someone other than Wahlberg’s hands, a noir resolution in which the hardboiled protagonist imposes his vision of justice on the femme fatale wouldn’t have felt so nihilistic, nay, misogynistic. Being killed by someone so incapable of expressing nuance or any sense of irony–wry or otherwise–is like being smothered to death by a giant loaf of sourdough bread. Bread doesn’t know pain, can’t feel empathy, and won’t reflect upon the tragedy your loss represents: If you kill a character with a thing that can neither feel nor inspire empathy, you have made that character and their ultimate sacrifice a device to laboriously advance the viewer from one page to the next. Understand, the lack of empathy in literary Parker is that he’s a sociopath. In Wahlberg, it’s that he’s an idiot. Now picture sitting through dozens of screaming nothings for three days in the company of an underwear model who recently tried to get his racial hate crimes expunged from the official record so his hamburger shop could get a liquor license. Thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime, you don’t even have to imagine it.